An in-depth look at the April 22nd special election: Results from across the state

Although the demise of King Coun­ty Propo­si­tion 1 was the most note­wor­thy out­come of last night’s spe­cial elec­tion, it’s impor­tant to remem­ber there were oth­er mea­sures on the bal­lot as well.  Accord­ing to the Wash­ing­ton Sec­re­tary of State’s office, there were thir­ty-five bal­lot mea­sure on the bal­lot across the state.

Turnout was depressed this April, which is no dif­fer­ent than oth­er spe­cial elec­tions in our state, with only about 20–30% of eli­gi­ble vot­ers cast­ing their bal­lots in the spe­cial elec­tion. While we aren’t going to go into detail about all of them, here are some of the impor­tant results which came out of last night.

Propo­si­tion 1: Neigh­bor­hood Parks & Zoo Improve­ments and Safe­ty Upgrades

Vot­ers in Taco­ma were asked to approve a $198 mil­lion dol­lar bond to be used for pre­serv­ing parks and pro­tect­ing nat­ur­al areas, water­front access, and local land­marks. This mon­ey would also be used to update ani­mal care sys­tems and safe­ty at the Point Defi­ance Park, Zoo and Aquar­i­um in order to main­tain nation­al accred­i­ta­tion. A major attrac­tion in the area, the Zoo wouldn’t be able to obtain high-atten­tion ani­mals with­out the ren­o­va­tions fund­ed by the bal­lot mea­sure. About a third of the rev­enue will go towards the Zoo.

Vot­ers in the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Park Dis­trict of Taco­ma found it impor­tant to fund all of these improve­ments, and more than 63% of the bal­lots count­ed by Elec­tion Night vot­ed yes. This is a result unlike­ly to change as more bal­lots are counted.

Spokane Val­ley Library Cap­i­tal Facil­i­ties Area Propo­si­tion 1 &2

Spokane Val­ley, the City of Spokane’s more con­ser­v­a­tive neigh­bor (and a munic­i­pal­i­ty whose idea of eco­nom­ic revi­tal­iza­tion was putting shrub­bery in the medi­ans on the high­way a cou­ple of years ago) vot­ed yes­ter­day on two propo­si­tions, whether they should estab­lish a Library Cap­i­tal Facil­i­ties Area to raise rev­enue for library con­struc­tion and ren­o­va­tion (Prop. 1).

Spokane Val­ley vot­ers also were asked to decide whether to approve a $22 mil­lion bond to fund those projects. In this elec­tion, the peo­ple of Spokane Val­ley spoke in strong sup­port for their pub­lic libraries and agreed to estab­lish the Cap­i­tal Facil­i­ties Area and fund the bond by around 58% and 54%, respec­tive­ly.

Okanogan Coun­ty Methow Val­ley Recre­ation District

In this spe­cial elec­tion about 6,000 vot­ers in Okanogan Coun­ty were decid­ing whether or not to cre­ate a park dis­trict. The Methow Val­ley Recre­ation Dis­trict, as it would be called, would sup­port com­mu­ni­ty-based recre­ation facil­i­ties which are acces­si­ble both phys­i­cal­ly and finan­cial­ly for residents.

Instead of wait­ing until after the deci­sion was made about whether the dis­trict should be estab­lished, an elec­tion was held con­cur­rent­ly for poten­tial com­mis­sion­ers of the dis­trict, the only can­di­date elec­tion this April. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the mea­sure failed with only 380 out of 1,905 votes cast in favor of the cre­ation of the dis­trict.

In one of the quirks of this elec­tion, each of the win­ners of the com­mis­sion­er races to gov­ern the dis­trict received more votes for their elec­tion than the num­ber of votes in favor of the actu­al cre­ation of the Recre­ation Dis­trict itself.